In the final decade of the 19th century, the phenomenon of Russian culture called Abramtsevo connected Vrubel's life and work with the name of Savva Mamontov. This period and place marked the apogee of Renaissance universalism in the work of Vrubel, a philosopher, artist, painter, decorator, illustrator, sculptor and architect.

In 1889, Mamontov opened a ceramics workshop in Abramtsevo, where craftsmen could create glazed ceramics, or majolica.

When the Mamontov family purchased its estate, the kilns of the Abramtsevo home were in ruins. Some of the surviving multi-colored tiles from the 18th century were preserved in Mamontov's collection. Perhaps the initiative came from Mamontov's desire to restore the artistic traditions of ceramics and return the kilns of Abramtsevo to their former beauty. For a professional artist like Vrubel, work with ceramics and traditional crafts required special technical knowledge. Mamontov invited the young, talented and enthusiast ceramics engineer P. Vaulin to direct the studio; he understood perfectly the enormity of the task of «restoring majolica and all the beauty of its Russian exoticism.»

Many artists of the Abramtsevo circle would test their skills in the studio, and paradoxical as it may first seem, it was Vrubel, the most imaginative and sublime among them, who brought the applied arts to the level of a true artistic phenomenon. In his works, color conquered Russian sculpture with all its decorative wealth.

For a master whose oil paintings appeared to be composed of shimmering crystals, majolica which combined color and volume in a seamless whole held endless possibilities. As a painter, Vrubel strove to overcome the flatness of canvas to become a sculptor. He shaped volume and form in a complex play of surfaces to reach their inner depths. «I was pleased to notice that my desire to embrace form as fully as possible interfered with my painting; I made a digression and decided to sculpt the Demon: sculpted, he would only help my painting, since after illuminating him according to the demands of the painting, I could use him as the ideal model», the artist wrote in 1888. And if here he worked as a painter who wanted to «touch» the fleshless face of the Demon in order to reproduce him on the canvas, then Vrubel the sculptor was working with majolica.

Ceramic is essentially nothing other than artificial stone, created by fire from clay, the decaying elements of ancient stone. Vrubel created sculpture, understanding the material as colored stone, not as a background for painted decoration, which sets colored ceramics apart from painted pieces of clay.

The first years of work with ceramics brought the sculpture called Egyptians (1891-1896, State Tretyakov Gallery). The delicate face is perfect in its plastic beauty and the movement of whispering lips; a thick scarf dotted with fractures embraces the neck. Vrubel sculpts, mastering the material with inspiration: the folds lightly take shape in irregular facets, flowing with transfusions of color through the glaze of a light-blue color scheme, creating a beautiful constellation of crystals. Thus the play of painterly planes with the fractures of the facets, coming together and intersecting, creates fantastic clusters and crystals in Demon (Seated) (1890, State Tretyakov Gallery).

The stylistic features of the art of ancient Egypt are hinted at in Mask of the Lybian Lion (1891-1892, State Tretyakov Gallery), with its laconic expression of a sphinx and the classically clear architecture of faceted volume filled with color. Here the gift of the monumental artist powerfully announces itself; it was embodied in the monumental «ceramic painting» of the master.

Mikula Selyaninovich and Volga. Fireplace, majolica, 1898-1899. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.

In the fireplace based on the Russian epic Mikula Selyaninovich and Volga (1898-1900, State Tretyakov Gallery) Vrubel's powerful decorative imagination and his tight control of the concept enabled him to find a unity of architecture and painting that resonated absolutely with the content. «Music of the whole person» (Vrubel's words) resonates in the image of Mikula. The power of the Russian soil resides in the labor of the heroic ploughman, not the heroic warrior. The fireplace is constructed as a fade of a building, crested with a frontispiece. The silhouettes of Mikula (on the left) and Volga (on the right) repeat the architectural lines. Vrubel declines to use traditional covering of tiles, having already used them in the ovens of the Abramtsevo estate, where the material itself was merely a background for decoration, and the network of seams inevitably broke up the unity of painting. He created a ceramic panel like a large mosaic of colored stone, forming it from shaped pieces, the seams of which create the basis of a drawing when united. The line formed by the seam is more expressive than a painted line, and to avoid a gap between them the artist filled the rest of the drawing with false fissures on the wet clay, varying their depth in relation to the strength of expression. Thus, in the faces of his figures, the fissures pass to lower sculpture and turn into a flat relief, like an Egyptian one, which came out of the drawing on the clay wall. The Egyptian silhouette resembles the structure of Mikula's figure (the head in profile and the front-facing torso), and the flatness of the color, spread out in distinct patches, calls to mind the murals of ancient Egypt.

In The Assyrian, Vrubel brought the technique of intensifying color with modeling to perfection. He executed the eyes with virtuosity: painting and modeling merge to give the gaze a new degree of expression. This small work presents the image of an Asian potentate animated by strength, passion and terrible grandeur. Only eyes speak in this silent mask. The late 1890s was a time of an extraordinary, ever increasing tide of creative power, a time when «quaint personal happiness» (in Vrubel's words) took shape in the life of the artist. His work on productions of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's operas «The Snow Maiden» and «Sadko» brought him great artistic pleasure. As Vrubel created costumes and decorations while listening his wife's singing, he immersed himself in the poetic world of imagery from Russian fables and fairy-tales. He deeply felt the affinity of his own coloring to the timbres of Rimsky-Korsakov's music, how its unique decorative quality was subjugated to strict harmony and compositional mastery. «Thanks to your good influence, I decided to dedicate myself to the legacy of Russian fairy tales… Not to repeat muses for the millionth time, but make something Russian, for example, Lel, the beauty of spring …» Vrubel wrote to the composer.

In the years of his creative collaboration with Vrubel, Vaulin discovered the secret of producing restorative glazes. Vrubel saw in them a new aesthetic message of ceramics; he used them to transforms a miracle of chemistry into a miracle of art. The technique of restorative firing is based on the chemical process of restorative in the fire of the forge of oxides present in colored glazes and metals. That is how the power of fire creates beauty: watercolor pools of shining chandeliers lie across the molten glazes, a metallic smoke transforms color, as if leaving the glare of fire on the surface. The light of the flame gave birth to fairy-tale fantasies and to the sound of bright, colorful, rejoicing music Vesna (Spring), Lel, Tsar Berendei and Volkhova (1899-1900, State Tretyakov Gallery) appeared from the flames… Sculptural suites, artistic variations on the themes of operas are executed on the boundary between art forms. The works hint at the idea of creating a union of painting and sculpture, grouping half-figures into a spatial whole. Each composition bespeaks the unity of rhythm; each resonates like a composed musical chord. The smooth, fluid shapes are wrapped in a mysterious smoke of metallic patina. Allowing the clay to flow freely, the artist declares his power over it, becoming a participant in the creation of nature. Thus, Volkhova's clothing is perceived not as a theatrical costume, but the natural form of a fairy-tale princess. Nadezhda Zabela, the muse of two geniuses (both the composer and the artist) was like the human hypostasis of a fantastic creature. It is no surprise that in sculptural versions of fairy-tale heroes Vrubel captured the features of his wife, elevating his feeling to a universal human story.

Now, in the flowering of mature mastery, having learned all the secrets of the craft of ceramics, Vrubel could afford to make bold artistic experiments: he created versions of a single image, experimenting with composition, color and texture. He enriched majolica with his painterly achievements, using the typical decorative device of melting dark tones in deep shapes; in reworking the surface with a sculptural tool, he achieved the effect of equal expression of strokes in his drawings. His contemporaries said that the first specimens of majolica were sculpted and painted by Vrubel himself and fired under his observation.

At the World's Fair of 1900, Mamontov won a gold medal as an «exhibitor» of majolica products, and «the exhibitor's employee» Vrubel won a gold medal for the works made in the Abramtsevo studio, which included the fireplace Mikula Selyaninovich, and the sculptural suites on operas with colored metal decorations.

Vrubel's majolica works are worthy of joining the ranks of works not only by ceramics artists of modern Europe, but also the ancient masters, and give us the right to speak of the creation of a new culture of ceramics in the Abramtsevo studio.